ere my own, and this thing had broken out."

"Oh, I'd say to print it, every word," she answered promptly. "Or"--she
spoke very slowly and with a tremor of color flickering in her
cheeks--"if it were mine, I'd tell you to print it."

He looked up with a transfigured face. His hand fell on hers, in the
covert of the little shelter of plants behind which they sat. "Do you
realize what that implies?" he questioned.

"Perfectly," she answered in her clear undertone.

He bent over to her hand, which turned, soft palm up, to meet his lips.
She whispered a warning and he raised his head quickly. Ely Ives had
passed near by.

"Marrineal's familiar," said Banneker. "I wonder how he got here.
Certainly I didn't ask him.... Very well, Io. I'll compromise. But ... I
don't think I'll put that quotation from the Areopagitica at the head of
my column. That will have to wait. Perhaps it will have to wait until
I--we get a paper of our own."

"Poor Ban!" whispered Io.

CHAPTER VIII

Once a month Marrineal gave a bachelor dinner of Lucullan repute. The
company, though much smaller than the gatherings at The House With Three
Eyes, covered a broader and looser social range. Having declined several
of his employer's invitations in succession on the well-justified plea
of work, Banneker felt it incumbent upon him to attend one of these
events, and accordingly found himself in a private dining-room of the
choicest of restaurants, tabled with a curiously assorted group of
financiers, editors, actors, a small selection of the more raffish
members of The Retreat including Delavan Eyre; Ely Ives; an elderly
Jewish lawyer of unsavory reputation, enormous income, and real and
delicate scholarship; Herbert Cressey, a pair of the season's
racing-kings, an eminent art connoisseur, and a smattering of
men-about-town. Seated between the lawyer and one of the racing-men,
Banneker, as the dinner progressed, found himself watching Delavan Eyre,
opposite, who was drinking with sustained intensity, but without
apparent effect upon his debonair bearing. Banneker thought to read a
haunting fear in his eyes, and was cogitating upon what it might
portend, when his attention was distracted by Ely Ives, who had been
requested (as he announced) to exhibit his small skill at some minor
sleight-of-hand tricks. The skill, far from justifying its possessor's
modest estimate, was so unusual as to provoke expressions of admiration
from Mr. Stecklin, the